Day: March 20, 2009

In case you’re too happy and need a downer for this weekend, here are some political and fiscal notes. I drew the inspiration for doing another of these from this post.

– Newsflash: we don’t know where government dollars go. Hank Paulson promised us that it would be meticulously followed and one of Obama’s campaign themes was transparency. Obviously, this has turned out to be totally different than anyone with a modicum of knowledge of public choice theory could ever have guessed…

– Remember that whole thing about Barack Obama not signing up lobbyists? Yeah, uh, just forget that one… That was probably just some rapscallion messing with his teleprompter.

– In case you were afraid the nonexistent-American community would be underrepresented in the next census, don’t worry—ACORN’s on the job.

– Megan McArdle criticizes Republicans for going after Obama nominees. There are two problems with her argument. The first is that Republicans aren’t the ones tanking them (as several commenters point out), and the second is that we’re talking about serious issues here, like, say, tax fraud. If McArdle wants Obama to get sanctimonious about his nominees, maybe he should start nominating ones who aren’t corrupt. Like Richard Holbrooke! Oh, wait… [P.S. – He still would have been a better Secretary of State than Hillary. But seriously, aren’t there _any_ Democrats who aren’t corrupt and Barack Obama knows? Well, okay, he is from Chicago, after all…]

– I still like Megan McArdle, though, even if I do think she’s totally off-base on the above issue. Here’s her on “shovel-ready” projects, noting that, like any government project, “shovel-ready” actually means “ready to shovel money into the furnace.”

– How dare Wal-Mart pay bonuses! Don’t they know it’s an economic crisis and the only people whose wages should go up are in Congress? I love CRC’s comment: “When…for God’s sake, WHEN will Wal-Mart finally be unionized so that this madness, cruelty and clear exploitation of its workers can come to an end?!?!”